Amber Road Launches Carrier Cargo Screening

Today, Amber Road announced a new cargo screening solution to address the challenge carriers face in identifying shipments that may contain prohibited, hazardous, or dual-use goods based only on the limited information provided on a transportation manifest or air waybill. The solution is ideal for global logistics providers who must aggregate and accurately screen a high volume of shipments from multiple providers to comply with increasingly stringent laws.

The global logistics industry is challenged by trade regulations related to Know Your Customer (KYC) which requires carriers know the shipper, the recipient, and the end-use of the products they carry to ensure that goods are not shipped to a sanctioned party or embargoed country and comply with non-proliferation of dual-use goods unauthorized for general trade. Customs authorities around the world are increasingly monitoring the effectiveness of logistics providers’ cargo screening processes to determine compliance. There are numerous examples of companies that use only “exact matching” screening algorithms on names and addresses who have been cited for failing to meet the standard of reasonable care and have been penalized with escalating fines.

“Global trade requires that companies keep up with ever-changing regulations and standards of reasonable care to maintain their trade privileges,” said Nathan Pieri, Chief Product Officer at Amber Road. “However, the market has been devoid of tools to meet these more stringent examinations. With our new Carrier Cargo Screening Solution, we have developed new content libraries and advanced algorithms to offer a robust supply chain risk platform ideally suited for global logistics providers."

Amber Road’s Carrier Cargo Screening Solution is built on the foundation of its leading Restricted Party Screening tools and Global Knowledge® trade content information service. With hundreds of millions of screens per day against over 600 lists, the solution uses advanced computational linguistics algorithms and a tuning workbench to provide high accuracy with a minimum of false positives.

The new Carrier Cargo Screening is very advanced and completely unique. It uses algorithms developed to process natural language to synthesize product descriptions to determine if the goods being shipped are of a concern. To add more intelligence to these algorithms, Amber Road’s trade content team has developed special libraries that translate technical phraseology into common language and trade terms typically found on source transportation orders such as manifests and air waybills. When carriers use the solution to screen product descriptions and other parameters, the algorithm applies millions of data points to calculate a risk score and alert the carrier to potential problems.

Carriers can aggregate risk scores based on an overall risk index to determine whether a shipment should be flagged for further review, enabling carriers to manage by exception. Any potential concerns can be resolved within the Amber Road platform or an API is available to return a comprehensive set of screening results that can be resolved in the carrier’s own system of record.

“We are very excited about the impact our new solution will have in the carrier industry,” said Jim Preuninger, CEO, Amber Road. “We have solved a critical problem by combining our advanced technologies with our vast experience in linking software with content. We expect our new offering to generate significant interest and meaningful new subscriptions starting this year."